A year of Italian cooking

[Kevin72]

All right, Hathor and I are working something up for the next resolution. PM me if you're interested in taking part. It doesn't require a yearlong commitment, but you may be doing some legwork at some point.

[Kevin72]

Last night we had some deep-fried calzones. You read that right. Somehow, they found a way to make calzones even better.

These were a version typically served around Christmas, stuffed with escarole, anchovies, garlic, chilies, capers, pecorino, and ricotta. Normally you also add pine nuts and currants but I like the savory, spicy onslaught you get with just the other ingredients. Schwartz gives a similar recipe but "just" as a normal baked, butter-enriched pie.

In a case of good timing, the movie Goodfellas started on HBO just when we sat down to eat. Another movie full of great food scenes that influenced my early cooking: I tried, many times, to sliver garlic so thin “it would liquefy in a pan with just a little oil”.

My wife’s heading out of town to spend an early Christmas weekend with her family, so it’s bachelor food and leftovers for me. How selfish of her to disrupt all this cooking I have to do yet!

[mrbigjas]

in scenic lower bucks county, pennsylvania, where i grew up, there was a pizza place called gino's that made deep-fried calzones. but they called them ginocottis. and they certainly didn't have greens in them, but rather just cheese and sauce and whatever pizza topping you'd want.

man that was good. a puff of fried dough, you crack it open and there's a puddle of 375-degree melted cheese and sauce inside... sure it wasn't 'authentic' italian, but it was tasty.

(of course googling gino's only turns up my previous posts about that place here on eg...)

[FoodMan]

apparently, according to Schwartz, there’s even a saying in Italian about an octopus cooking in its own juices, akin to the English proverb “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it”.

That is true. In J. Oliver's "Jamie's Italy" he talks about it and provides the recipe for cooking the octopus with no added liquid. He uses this octopus as the base for all the rest of the recipes (grilling, sauteing, braising,...) just like Mario cooks his in red wine with a cork. I've never tried the Oliver method though.

[Kevin72]

Lots of ugly bachelor cooking this weekend. My dinner Sunday night: spaghetti with baccala.

The baccala is simmered in a condimento of standard Southern Italian flavor elements: red onion, chilies, currants, pine nuts, capers, and olives. The olives I used were Gaeta, and they almost completely dissolved into the sauce, turning it a rather unappealing blackish-purple color.

Also, some more not-entirely-Neapolitan cookie making.

In the foreground are lemon drops from the dessert book Sweet Sicily by Victoria Granof. Off to the side were my first attempt at biscotti, one with almonds and chocolate chips, the other with anise seed. In the background are mustaciolli, which are traditional to Naples and Campania, but I used the variation from Calabria I did back in August. These had ground almonds, honey, espresso, and chocolate in addition to the spices that both versions share: clove, cinnamon, orange zest, and nutmeg. I did try to do them in the Neapolitan tradition of cutting them into diamond shapes, but botched it horribly. They looked okay going into the oven but then got lumpy in the heat of the oven, and when I went to scoop them off the baking sheet, they also got a little more twisted and irregular in shape. And that too-liquid icing didn't help, either. Ugh.

[Carlovski]

That deep fried calzone sounds great.

That filling sounds remarkably similar to something I make as a topping for a very thin puff pastry tart, and occasionally pizza (Except no ricotta)

[Kevin72]

It seems like the de rigeur filling in Campanian cooking. I'd imagine it would even be a good vegetable dish without the ricotta.

I always forget how good it is until I make it. I've also used feta instead of ricotta before and liked it even better.

[Kevin72]

in scenic lower bucks county, pennsylvania, where i grew up, there was a pizza place called gino's that made deep-fried calzones.  but they called them ginocottis.  and they certainly didn't have greens in them, but rather just cheese and sauce and whatever pizza topping you'd want.

man that was good.  a puff of fried dough, you crack it open and there's a puddle of 375-degree melted cheese and sauce inside...  sure it wasn't 'authentic' italian, but it was tasty.

(of course googling gino's only turns up my previous posts about that place here on eg...)

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While you're right it may not be entirely authentic, there's something to be said about such go-for-broke excess. Where the calzones full-sized or mintatures?

[mrbigjas]

they were full-sized. on saturday i mentioned this place to my parents, and they reminded me that the pizza place is actually called julio's, not gino's, despite the name of the dish. funny how memories work.

[hathor]

Good lord. I can't get to a computer for the better part of a week, and look what I was missing!! Kevin, if I had known you were making deep fried calzone, I would have been there in a flash, salivating at your doorstep! How coming there isn't a drooling smilie?

Some serious good food!! Can't wait to see and hear all about the Vigillia menu. We do a big Vigillia dinner as well, and I guess its time to start planning....

By the way, nice bachelor food!! What did you do to prep the baccala? Soak? Boil? I've tried all different ways and I'm still not thrilled with the results.

ciao!

[Kevin72]

I've never heard of boiling it before; I'd think it would get too tough or lose too much flavor. What specifically weren't you happy with? Do you like it when you've had it elsewhere?

The kind I get here is partially reconstituted, or at least not nearly the board-like consistency that I've heard the old product has. A two-day soak is probably even too much for it; it seemed a bit bland.

[Kevin72]

Last night was another seafood-themed meal setting the stage for the big feast on Christmas Eve. All of these items were from Batali's Holiday Food cookbook.

We started with two marinated fish: one was marinated anchovies, the other was fried, marinated bluefish.

The anchovies are a favorite of mine and I pretty much make them for my benefit alone. For the first time this year I tried using salt-packed anchovies instead of fresh ones or sardines (or one year, and to very poor results, smelt). They worked quite well. Fillet the anchovies, then marinate them for 12 hours in white wine vinegar. Drain, then submerge in olive oil and scatter oregano, garlic, and chilies over the top.

The bluefish is a substitution for the traditionally used eel. Flour and fry the fish, then make a vinegar "syrup" out of red wine vinegar, sugar, mint, garlic, and chilies. Pour this over the still-warm fillets.

For the primo, it was the non-seafood gnocchi alla sorrentina. Gnocchi are tossed in a spicey tomato sauce with ample basil and mozzarella. Arthur Schwartz's recipe has the interesting touch of baking them, which I considered but backed off from due to time constraints.

Finally it was shrimp in "aqua pazza" shrimp in crazy water, so named because originally the recipe included sea water, which only a man crazy with thirst would try to drink. In addition to the sea water--now just tap water mixed with salt--you have an aromatic base of fennel, onion, and chilies, and then the whole is simmered with more crushed tomatoes and white wine.

[hathor]

I've never heard of boiling it before; I'd think it would get too tough or lose too much flavor. What specifically weren't you happy with?  Do you like it when you've had it elsewhere?

The kind I get here is partially reconstituted, or at least not nearly the board-like consistency that I've heard the old product has. A two-day soak is probably even too much for it; it seemed a bit bland.

←

Boiling removes the salt from the baccalau. I usually only have access to the board stuff and that requires either multi days of soaking and/or boiling. Mostly its been too salty.

My favorite is stocafissa (sp?), the air dried variety but try finding that!

[Kevin72]

Christmas Eve and La Vigilia, the meal I have come to look forward to making all year long.

The menu:

Cocktail: Pomegranate Cosmopolitans

Antipasti:

Marinated Anchovies

Shrimp en Saor

Stuffed and Broiled Smelts

Clams Aragonate, Arigenate, Oregante, depending on whom you ask

Primo:

Spaghetti with Lobster

Secondi:

Stuffed Braised Squid

Fried Cod

Contorno:

Braised Rapini

When I was a kid (okay, fourteen or fifteen), we were living next door to an Italian family. One year on Christmas Eve, my family was sitting around to our “traditional” dinner of a cheese and cracker plate followed by a choice of either Onion Soup or Clam Chowder, and we got to talking about traditions. My mom then related how the family next door was eating a huge seafood feast, like five or six dishes, and among them were fried squid, mussel soup, and stewed eels. I didn’t even know you could eat these things, much less that they were part of the Italian repertoire! I was horrified and yet deeply fascinated all at once. Surely it was just “their” tradition, right? But how did they come by such weird things to eat? Mom answered that Italians everywhere always ate a huge seafood meal on Christmas Eve, that there had to be seafood in everything they ate, and that it was usually four or more courses. I glanced next door through their window and saw the four of them just sitting down to their dinner. I found myself privately wishing I was there to try some of this exotic stuff. My culinary world got a little larger that night, but at the same time my own family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner seemed a little smaller by comparison. I think my fascination with Italian food can be traced to that one incident.

Cooking a Vigilia meal is always a chance to recapture that moment, a culmination of years of fascination and admiration for Italian food and culture. Over the past few years, I’ve been culling together an assortment of Vigilia dishes, and last year rolled out a full-on seven course meal for my wife’s family. After we explained it to my mom, she at last couldn’t resist and asked us to do the same this year. I scoured Dallas for various frozen and preserved seafood items, my Mom called the seafood shop near them I’ve discussed previously and ordered, then called back almost daily to confirm, the rest of the items. Cooking took most of the day Christmas Eve and would've taken even longer without my mom helping out and my wife taking the pics.

Of course, we can’t have drama with so much going on: about an hour outside of Dallas on our way down to Houston, I suddenly, horribly remembered that I’d forgotten to pack the baccala which I’d so laboriously tracked down. We spent all day Friday dashing from one place to the next, and in a rare case of not wanting the traditional item, the only version I was able to find was the flat, boardlike, authentic product that would need three to four days of soaking, not the 24 hours I had to work with. So I fell back on regular cod.

I battered it using a soda water and flour combo that normally goes on the baccala, heated a couple of inches of oil in a large cast iron pot on the outside grill, and set about trying to fry it. Complete disaster, from start to finish. I guess I hadn’t dried the fish well before dipping it in the batter, as the batter almost immediately slipped off, the cod fell apart, and then sank to the bottom of the pot, where it promptly stuck. We fished some out and used what we could, but the real deal, the sine qua non of a Vigilia feast, baccala, was lacking at the table this year.

Everything else, though, was great. I’m always pleased at the shrimp en saor recipe, a modification of the Venetian sfogi en saor. The spaghetti with lobster is, I believe, the hands-down hit of the evening and we capably polished off the whole bowl. The clams, too, were a solid hit. Everyone was pleasantly surprised by the smelts and the marinated anchovies. I was in a bad mood about the cod when the secondi were served, and so didn’t pay much attention to the calamari, other than that it seemed a little underseasoned.

We went for a nice stroll afterwards, looked at neighborhood lights, then came back to a cookie platter. Here, nearly twenty years after I had first heard of it, I think I had finally reached that seafood feast meal.

Edited December 27, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[Kevin72]

Ah, what the hell. Here’s our Christmas dinner, though there isn’t anything even approaching Neapolitan about it.

A “pantry canapé” of tuna, capers, and artichokes pureed with mayonnaise. Spread on crackers, then top with either pickles or roasted peppers.

The primo, gnocchi with blue cheese, was a recent after I got a potato press for Christmas a few years back and then whipped them up for that night’s dinner, instantly adding a new tradition:

The main was filet mignon with a mushroom/red wine deminglace, a savory spinach custard (as I previously mentioned, it comes from Pamela Sheldon Johns’ book Parmigiano), and mom’s stewed red cabbage, “Verona style”, which she actually picked up after talking to the cook at a restaurant in Verona they enjoyed.

[Nathan P.]

Great looking meal. Couple questions for you; how long did you braise the squid and what is in the lobster pasta besides the lobster and parsley? And is the shrimp in saor your own tweak of the classic? Oh, and were you frying in olive oil?

Nice to see some of your other food as well. I will hold off on my super loud bravos and standing ovation in case you cook anything else in the next 5 days

[Kevin72]

The lobster for the pasta are cooked in a pot with half a bottle of white wine, water, bay leaves, celery, parsley stems, and some plum tomatoes. Once they turn red, get them out of the pot, shock them in an ice bath, then get the meat out of the shells. Toss the shells back in the pot and cook them a while longer. I then strained the broth and reduced it to half the total volume.

The base for the pasta was garlic, chilies, and parlsey, then 1/2 cup of tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes. Then about 2 cups of the lobster broth, which was then reduced away to nearly nothing. I tossed the pasta in the pan with the sauce, another ladle of broth, and the juices from the lobster meat, then off the heat added the meat and parsley. The pasta takes on a very buttery consistency from the reduced lobster flavor and it is one of my favorite pastas. The spicey kick really sends it into orbit.

The shrimp are indeed, just a shrimp version of the Venetian recipe. Though I just now realized I forgot the currants and pine nuts. So it was red onion, celery, and then nearly equal parts red wine vinegar and sugar reduced to a syrup.

I didn't fry in olive oil; I had bought an enormous jug of it for this evening but forgot that, too, in the packing rush. So it was just vegetable oil augmented with a little olive oil.

Edit: The squid were actually "oven braised" due to a lack of stovetop space. I went an hour and ten minutes at 350.

Edited December 27, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[mrbigjas]

wow, that's amazing. good stuff.

what were the smelts stuffed with?

[Kevin72]

Ricotta, pecorino, parm, black pepper, and parsley or chives, I don't remember now which. I know, I know, "cheese and fish". But there is a recipe for Crostini Napoletani in Mario's Holiday Food book involving anchovies and ricotta whic this is a modification of. And I've read a couple of times that it's acceptable with such a mild cheese (ricotta) to go with such a strong fish.

[Kevin72]

Vincent Schiavelli, RIP

Schiavelli was the author of the book Many Beautiful Things which was indispensible during my month of Sicilian cooking. Not just a great cookbook, but a sweet, sad account of reconnecting with his ancestry in Polizzi Generosa in Sicily. He'll be missed.

[Pontormo]

Kevin, your night of seven fishes is beautifully presented in both words and images. I feel a bit like that orange cat, wanting so much to taste the stuffed squid, shrimp and spaghetti, especially!

As for the disappointment, sigh. You realize you are not alone. Many of us have similar stories of the one (or two) amazing culinary finds or triumphs left back on the kitchen counter.

Your gnocchi are also very tempting....

[Kevin72]

Thanks Pontormo!

What's extra frustrating about the disapointment is that I always knock fried food out of the park when I make it at home. My mom thinks it's too much of a fuss, messy, and smelly. Everytime I've done it for them at their place it's been leaden, greasy food that does indeed smell up the house. So this year, with my Dad's new grill with a burner attachment, I thought I had it locked up. And here, again, I was unable to make my case on how good it can be.

Edited December 29, 2005 by Kevin72 (log)

[Kevin72]

Tuesday night, a “light” soup to come down off the previous days of heavy eating. This was the Neapolitan Zuppa di Sante, “health soup”, so named for the homemade broth, the protein of the meatballs, the stracciatella of eggs and cheese beaten in before serving, and the leafy escarole.

Wednesday night was, good lord, another seafood meal. Now I have to use up all that baccala I left behind!

We started with Aqua d’Ananas, a pineapple cocktail from Mario Batali’s Holiday Food cookbook:

Batali’s writings have introduced me to the pleasures of pureed seasonal fruit mixed with sweet vermouth, as done here with pineapple, and I did last summer with watermelon (a must try).

We then had a primo of scialatielli, a pasta specialty of the Amalfi coast. The dough is mixed with pureed basil, rolled out thicker than standard pasta sheets (setting 4 of 6 on my machine) then cut on the horizontal as opposed to vertically to make short, stubby shapes. It was topped with a spicy shrimp and tomato sauce.

Despite the fact that mixing and rolling out the pasta filled my kitchen with the summery aroma of basil, and that the smell then got all over my hands, it did not carry through in the final dish. I’d make it with parsley next time, then augment with fresh torn basil at the end. Otherwise, though, a nice, unusual and very textured dish.

Now, THIS is a proper fish fry!

The baccala batter is soda water mixed with flour. I thoroughly dried the baccala out of its soak and coated it well, then slipped it into the oil. The coating thankfully didn’t blast right off as it had done on Christmas Eve. It was then topped with a lemon and mint “compote” of lemon, sugar, and water cooked down in a pan to make a syrupy consistency.

But, argggh! The baccala hadn’t soaked enough and was still a little unpleasantly salty and firm. This was a day and a half soak; I had soaked another piece from this same package for two days for the pasta I made a couple weeks ago and it was too soft and lost almost all its flavor. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be this year. This may be an item that gets jettisoned in subsequent years; too hard to make properly for a crowd, anyways.

[BarbaraY]

This is a wonderful series and a labor of love. Thanks so much for all your hard but loving work.

[Adam Balic]

Sorry to hear about the salt cod Kevin, what a bugger. I had a similar thing happen on the Christmas meal on a dish I practiced all year, so if you are like me you have similar mixed feelings of loathing, but wanting to make it 'right' some time soon.